Business English: Mixing Business with Pleasure!

http://www.engvid.com Business isn’t *all* business! In reality, business and pleasure mix. Are you prepared? Learn the best phrases to make social conversation with your associates. Equally important, find out which topics to avoid! You’ll also learn how to eliminate awkward silences, and how to make your clients or colleagues comfortable when speaking with them. Many business decisions and deals are made outside the office or meeting room. Whether you’re going for dinner with clients, or you’re on a business trip, watch this lesson to learn how to be confident in social situations! Then take the quiz here: http://www.engvid.com/business-english-mixing-business-with-pleasure/

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, everyone. I’m Jade. What we’re talking about today is mixing business with pleasure. So what does this mean? This can mean when you go for a business trip, you also have a little bit of fun while you’re there. But it can also mean that when you go out with your clients, it’s not all talk about work, work, work, business, business, business. You also get to know each other a bit, maybe have a few glasses of wine or something like that. I don’t know what you do on your business trips. But it’s not just about work. So I’m going to give you some conversational tips for your next business trip where you may decide to mix business with pleasure.

So I’ve broken it down into different conversation topics. So we’ll just go through those, and you will get some questions that you can ask to make yourself a dazzling conversationalist when you’re next with your clients.

So I was thinking: When do these kinds of business meetings happen? Often, they are in restaurants. So it could be the evening. It could be a lunch meeting. So anyway, you’re in a dining situation. You get in the restaurant. What do you say? You can say, “Have you been here before?” Or you might say, “What an impressive/charming/fascinating place!” This one’s an exclamation. You’re making an observation about the place. If it’s impressive, I would imagine that it’s quite a fine dining, expensive kind of place. If it’s charming, it’s original, and you’ve not really been somewhere like that before. If it’s fascinating, what could that mean? Just maybe something unusual for you that you haven’t experienced before.

If you’re the host, and you are taking your client to that place, maybe you want to say something about the place, and the reason why you decided to have your meeting there. You could say, “This is the best seafood restaurant in town.” So you’re trying to impress your client and show them that you’re taking them to all the best places. So you could change seafood. It could be a Chinese restaurant –you know, whatever, wherever you’re going.

So imagine you are in the restaurant situation. A really common conversation for you to have is talking about food in general, your likes and dislikes, and also making comparisons between countries and cuisine styles from different countries. So here are some questions you might ask. You can say, “Do you like English food?” Well, the joke there is that people around the world say that they don’t like English food and it’s really bad. So I wouldn’t be that hopeful for a very positive answer if you ask that question.

When you’re looking at the menu, especially if the menu is in a language that you don’t understand, you could say, “Could you recommend something?” Often it’s quite polite — at least in British culture — to let the host decide what you’re eating. So you might want to make that offer and say, “Can you recommend something?” You can also ask this to the waiter in the restaurant, as well, if you really don’t know what to choose.

And here’s another general question you could ask about food. So let’s imagine your client is from a different country and you don’t know much about the food culture of that country, you could say, “What do Italian people like to eat for breakfast?”